Tyrian

Really disagree with this, theres so many people who derive their fun from being a useful Hybrid-type player. Of course, its not everyones cup of tea - but its not neally as bad as this quote implies for everyone.

 

Incoherence

"So many" is a very vague term. Are there enough to fill the number of slots that exist for them? If there are too few of them, someone will inevitably feel "forced" to be that utility spec just so they can get a raid slot, instead of the "pure" spec which they find more fun. If there are too many, they'll shift to other roles with too few people (and be likewise unsatisfied with that). (You can easily make an analogy here to healers/tanks.)

 

Shakes

It's pretty hard to figure out too many vs too few, unless Blizzard does some kind of survey of their player base. Even then it'd probably be misleading, since many people don't realise they'd like to do a particular role until they try it.

It reminds me of the whole Warhammer "there are no healers" stuff, where the lead dev says something like "There will be nobody just standing at the back saying 'I heal you, now I heal you, then I heal you' because it's BORING" despite the fact if you ask people who heal in WoW, many of them are quite happy standing at the back and doing just that.

It seems to me all you can do is provide both big DPS and big utility and let people choose. Seems to be working pretty well at the moment, are guilds really having more or less trouble finding good arms warriors or shadow priests than good rogues or mages? The only utility DPS that's somewhat harder to get is probably enhance/ele shaman, and that's more to do with the class and so many being needed as resto than anything I think.

 

1337beast

I think it's a good decision by blizzard to make more spec viable and not only have cookie-cutters.

If you have played guild wars, you know what is the "metagame". The fact that you can stop playing one month, come back, and the build are totally different because the "metagame" has changed. If Blizzard make more skills viable and less "must-have" talents, PVP will improve I think. Yes there WILL be a cookie-cutter build allowing you to have 1% more DPS and that's perfect for PVE.

In PVP tough, making more skills viable=builds changing constantly.

A warrior example: you run 41/20 because you hate being rage-starved and your team has enough CC to dispense you doing spell reflect/disarm. Well the one time another warrior will disarm you for 10 seconds and win the match, you may change for a 33/28 or 35/23/3 just because of that. That's a very good thing for PVP cause it forces player to think and adapt their build to the circumstances. Problem is 33/28 and 35/23/3 are only 5 talents points different. In WOTLK, you'll probably need to change 10-15 or 20 talents points to "adapt" what people are playing.


Right now you have an optimal build because you're always running against the same specs.


Imagine if Mortal strike spec was completely useless VS arcane mages for whatever reason. Well who cares? You won't see any arcane mages cause the best spec by far is frost. Well in WOTLK, you might run into an arcane mage because it's "viable" and then realise your MS is useless. You'll respec fury with TG and suddenly realizes you completly own the disc priests for whatever reason. The priest will respec holy because disc is too weak against those TG warriors. Then because the priest is no more disc, the other healer in the 5V5 might tweak his build a bit to compensate for some talents the priest's now missing. Then because the other healer tweaked his build, the rogue might play more defensively. Then because he plays more defensively, the other team might swap a healer for another DPS to add more pressure.
You understand my point??


If more talents are "viable" you'll see more diversity and people trying new things and counters. I think that makes the game much more interesting but that's just my opinion :P. Some people prefer to have a definite build that has not change for almost a year now.

 

What Do I Type Here?

I think mortal strike is pretty important to have in this game but it certainly does need to be spread out for the sake of both warriors and those who run comps without war/rog/hunter. The way that it is currently set up, 50% or 0%(practically), is too limited and just silly.

I'm not against the idea of, for instance, every class having a 15% healing debuff that would stack with similar debuffs from your teammates, with a 30% total cap on this MS-lite, and then letting war/rog/hunter push it up another 20% back to the regular 50%. Warriors get to use whatever they like, and everyone else doesn't _have_ to group with a healing debuffer.

 

Draele

I think it's a good idea. As I stated in the respecs thread: Many people identify very strongly with one talent tree or another. Playing their tree makes the game more enjoyable for them. If not for RP reasons then purely mechanically/playstyle driven reason.

Affliction is fun for with all of it's DoTs, self healing and debuffs. I don't have any interest in playing a pet driven or nuke driven character in PvE or PvP. Even with Discipline and Holy there are fairly distinct differences: Holy is rooted more in healing throughput while Disciple is a little more "tricks up your sleeve" style of play.

Many of you may not care by which mechanics you play with so long as you succeed- in which case there will always be one spec that will edge out another if only by 1% in which case you use that best spec. For the rest of us we can be 1% worse but play what we enjoy.

It's a win/win AFAIC.

Rantings of the Afflicted, a Warlock blog: http://draele.blogspot.com/

 

ZeroWashu

Will not the better player know what spec is best for the raid and be that already before coming along?

I do not know how many other servers operate but right now the focus is on gear when I watch pugs and even some internal guild runs. I have run into some lousy players who only got into the instance/raid/etc because they were all epics; even if the majority of them are pvp epics. Having a plug in that identifies where the items they are wearing and where they drop helps eliminate those who simply welfared their way into their armor versus those who can listen, be patient, and do what they are told.

Too much of what passes for play today is built around "how safe and routine" can we make it. That returns the game to a a gear and spec check. To some point it also becomes a class check. The majority of calls for DPS really mean DPS + CC which routinely means mage CC. (even though I will willingly take a hunter just as much if not more) Until you form your close knit group that forms the basis for everything from simple heroics to raiding what other means do you have for measuring other players?

 

Tejs

It seems to me that if you want truly meaningful talent specializations, you need to do away with cookie-cutter talent builds.

Well how do you do that? The only answer I can come up with are mutually exclusive talents. We partially have that currently with the placement of talents deep in trees, so certain talents cannot be matched with others. But why not have decision based mutually exclusive talents?

Take this example:

A shadow priest wants to enhance his damage with talents. The first tier has 4 available talent choices:
1) Improves the damage of your spell by 50%
2) Reduce the casting time of your spell by 50%
3) Reduce the mana cost of your spell by 50%
4) Your spell now gives a debuff which restores 300% the mana cost of the spell on a crit.

Structured as such, all are powerful talents. But a new mechanic, mutually exclusive talents, means that if you invest points in talent 1, talent 2 greys out and you cannot invest into it, or talent 3 is no longer available etc.

Expand the talent trees so that instead of say 4 talents per tier, you can choose between 6 with the mutual exclusion. The balance factor is then the issue of making sure each tier's set of talents are relatively balanced. There would likely be differences in the power level of talents (for example, 3 and 4 are not really the same in terms of mana consumption). With the same prerequesite system we have now, certain less desirable talents can become more desirable if linked to a more powerful talent in a below tier.

Thus, between players, some may opt for the bigger numbers, higher crits of Talent 1, while others choose to machine gun their spells with option 2. Both should relatively be the same damage so balance is more or less maintained.

 

Ja7us

I don't see how this would change anything. As now, if the talents accomplish similar things (say, increasing DPS) then one will be better than the others, and if they do radically different things, they'll promote different playstyles, the way different talent trees sometimes do now.

 

Solmyr77

You should know, that there is no thing like a "main" healer in WoW. All of those 4 classes can perform pretty equally at healing during early raid content.
Because of this, I advise you to make both your Paladin and your Shaman healers since they are in much higher demand than Holy Priests after you pass early Karazhan, where Shackle is a factor. The reason being, that totems and blessings are far better than PW:F.
Your Priest will outdo the Paladin's healing at some point in progression because of CoH, but that's a long way from Karazhan. You should actually make him Shadow, because that's a highly searched for spec, which you don't cover at the moment.

For the Druid I'd say Feral, as a Resto he'd be in the same boat as your Priest and as a Moonkin he wouldn't ever see group combat. Feral on the other hand is a great spec for being the second tank in anything. You can't compete for the maintank spot with the Warrior because of the debuffs he provides to the group, but he can't compete with the Feral for the support tank spot either.

 

Tejs

Isnt that the point though? It's no longer "Fire Spec Mage", but "Speed Fire Spec Mage" or "Debuff Damage Fire Spec Mage" giving out subspecs for each tree. It's ok if the DPS of one is greater than the other if one excels at different situations where the other is reduced in quality. It's an illusion that somewhat dispels cookie cutter builds.

 

ildon

If they can explain that they understand it's suboptimal and why but have a logical reasoning behind choosing their spec (and the difference is small enough and room for error in the encounter large enough that it doesn't matter, which is true of basically every single pre-sunwell encounter in the game) then why would you risk bringing a player who might miss a kick on RoS or might stand in fire on Archimonde or will let constructs in the raid on Gorefiend, just because they're "the right spec"?

 

Sydane

Exactly, and as often as not, someone who excels in their spec, even if it is "sub-optimal," will out-perform someone who simply has the "spec of the day" and doesn't really fully understand all the nuances. Not to mention the fact that the RNG and group composition are both larger factors than specs for almost all dps classes.

I think all anyone really wants is for their play style to work in every situation well enough to be of use. That's why there are pvp talents in every tree, you shouldn't have to be a certain spec to have pvp abilities. Most people understand the difference between optimal and viable, and understand that there are times that group makeup or spec must trump all, but those times are few and far between. For example, the biggest complaint I hear from prot warriors is not that they can't pvp in their pve spec, but that there is no real way to "tank" in pvp at all, forcing them to play an entirely different role.

 

footloop

That seems very similar to the situation we have now, except even harder to balance.

 

Cube

You haven't played a healer in PvP.

Chain heal or all that green crap swirling around people is the most effective AoE taunt in the game.

 

Mideci

It feels like -- and forgive me if I'm mistaken --you are missing something fundamental in a desire to solve a perceived "problem". And given you raid at a high level, I believe, I'm not clear how you're missing it.

The only way to make specs "viable" for both is to give everyone all the base talents. Period.

Otherwise, you will absolutely, positively need to optimize to be reasonably effective at your job in raiding or in PVP. There are talents I can't possibly imagine using on my priest in PVE for any purpose whatsoever. And those same talents I'd be laughed out of the arena without. Ditto healing/holy talents. Since said talents are at the bottom of opposite trees, I'm not even a little clear on what the proposal is supposed to be here?

"Some people get to play a spec that might work kind of OK in both."

Pass.

Let's allow for the dual-spec system to get put in place so we can keep on optimizing to play our characters properly in PVE and PVP and stop trying to shoehorn nonsense like Shadowstep into PVE as if it's somehow important (even though, yes, it can be nice once in a while) or to try to make Circle of Healing an Arena talent.

There's a lot of hand wringing about "cookie cutter" builds but the only way to make all specs viable everywhere is to turn all classes into "cookie cutter" classes such that all warlocks basically have the same abilities everywhere. And that seems a lot less interesting than the highly imperfect status quo.

 

Nezralix

Once again, although it's conceptually very difficult or impossible to create talent specs that function optimally in both PvE and PvP, this doesn't mean that Blizzard shouldn't make the effort to provide some cross-functional power into each talent tree. There are some good examples in the feral tree of talents that have different positive side effects in different scenarios; even the resto shaman / holy paladin talents for converting INT into spell damage could just as easily have only modified +healing, and thus been less versatile.

It's generally fine for a talent spec to excel at either PvE or PvP, or at some sub-role within one of those. It's *not* fine to give up on having a talent spec do anything *but* that role that it excels at. It's an important distinction. Playing a given spec shouldn't feel like a horrendous chore if you deviate from the mold.

 

Sydane

The problem you run into, and we're running into here, and that will never change, is that this isn't a simple issue. Not even close to simple. And quite frankly, the priorities vary a lot from person to person. A lot of things are viable without being optimal. In fact, I'd argue that we have reached the point where every spec/role is viable in 25 man content. There are very few encounters that require specific classes, and when they do, they rarely require specific specs of those classes. Now this is far from optimal, and is probably the difference between the guilds that have downed KJ and the ones that are just getting to Twins, but it's certainly not the biggest difference between Sunwell guilds and T5 guilds.

You've also got to consider what Blizzard's priorities most likely are. They are no doubt much more concerned with the fact that enhancement shaman can't get 5 man groups because of not having CC then they are with whether bringing a second one to a raid is better than bringing a rogue. Not that they don't care about both, it's just that the endgame balance is the last priority, not the first. This is of course the opposite of how most people on this forum feel. They are also in the stage of redesigning class functionality to allow for complex 10 man encounters being cleared by groups with unpredictable compositions.

Regarding the "viable hybrids" concept, the gear change may allow this to exist to a certain extent, but there seems to be no desire to develop the classes in this way. As mentioned before, the best thing Blizzard did for hybrids in BC was to make each tree distinct and unique and worth playing. A possibility might emerge for elemental shaman or moonkin druids to provide normal dps, group utility, and quality healing in the same gear on healing sensitive fights (like Bloodboil), without needing group stacking for the encounter, but guilds that want to group stack will always be able to do so in a game that is defined more by roles than by classes.

Truly the irony is that the only way they could make "hybrids" viable was to make them more exclusive, otherwise, as has been mentioned here, they become far too powerful. Really, the biggest problems hybrids face is the PR of being a class that can tank or heal and not wanting to do either. DPS hybrids don't get group invites often because those doing the inviting are just bitter, because they are probably still looking for a tank or healer. And believe me, the secondary spec/free respec idea is just going to make that worse.

Remember, almost all utility abilities are baseline. Sometimes there are talents to improve them, but this isn't like guild wars where the metagame changes mean skills literally don't exist in a fight. Every druid can decurse. Every mage can go invisible. So the metagame is limited by the relatively small amount of skills that vary from spec to spec. And yes, the ability to heal, even in an offspec, is powerful and difficult to balance around. If taking Shadow Form as a talent actually prevented all casting of healing spells at all times, and every other similar tree behaved in that same way, balancing those classes would be a lot different.

I really honestly don't think most players expect to be able to take one spec and be great at absolutely everything in the game. But it is a little silly if a T6 arms warrior can't get into a 5 man because he has no crowd control. Those are the type of balance issues that Blizzard needs to work on, and seems to be working on.


Amusing though that is, it doesn't help a prot warrior any.

 

deadlights

No kidding, I usually try to do my BG daily before raids (recently rerolled from my lock) so I'm still in my raiding spec and it's pretty much a shame that I can only use chain heal around completely clueless players who don't focus healers even though I'm specced for it and BGs is a good venue to make use of the jumps. Otherwise one chain heal is all it takes and I'm being trained. Maybe they should just give warriors the ability to disguise themselves as another class complete with a fake chain heal... voila... instant pvp tank LOL

 

Ashyne

Think about the abilities each of these classes have, and when you would want to use them. For instance, druids can decurse, thats a big time thing that a raid group might need for specific encounters than a priest or paladin can not do. Your mage can decurse, but are do you really want to bring more DPS is most situations when you are short on decursing, maybe but probably not. So resto MAY be the best choice.

Thats just an example of course, but think about the utility the base abilities each class has can bring to raid, and think about when you would want to use those in specific encounters, and that might help you decide how you want to spec your hybrid classes.

 

Saraya

It's probably impossible to make all specs viable for both PvE and PvP at the same time. However, one approach at handling this problem is to give an opportunity for more interaction between PvE and PvP.

Basically we have 4 separate avenues of the game right now: Small group PvE, large group PvE, small group PvP, large group PvP. However, they're all completely separated from each other. Each spec will have its respective strengths and weaknesses in each, but having strength in more than one category is largely irrelevant given the fact that you're really only going to be participating in one of the avenues, and will respec when changing to another avenue.

But what if there was a PvP map where there are both players and NPCs to fight, in both large and small numbers, and regardless of what you were doing, you'd be helping your side win. You can always help your side advance based on what your spec is strong in, rather than being pigeonholed into a certain playstyle for a certain avenue of the game. The concept sounds very much like AV I'm sure, but the difference is AV kind of forced PvE and PvP interaction rather than letting you choose.

I'm really looking forward to Lake Wintergrasp for this reason - it might give everyone a way to PvP without drastically changing the way they play.

Another idea I was thinking of was a temporary item that would turn your character into some sort of a general(basically, a warcraft 3 Hero version of your character as the actual Hero classes are being balanced to be normal classes). Generals would provide a passive aura depending on which class/spec they are, and maybe would have extra health or defenses. If a general falls, all the surrounding people might incur some additional penalty like losing some extra health. This is mostly flavor, but it would give a very good reason to bring a protection specced warrior or paladin to PvP since you'd want a general, and you'd want to keep your general alive.

I'll stop with this as this isn't really a brainstorm thread, but the message is that instead of trying to balance everyone in the current avenues we have available, maybe adding new avenues to play is an easier way to add "balance."